Will This App Forever Change the Way You Read or Write?

By Ryan Jenkins | Yahoo Small Business

Are you like me and prefer your reading to be quick, rich and engaging? With so many things competing for people’s attention these days, your content (book, ebook, blog, newsletter, email, etc) needs to be skim-able, scannable and scrollable for people to even pay attention to it. This new platform delivers a fresh experience for the next generation content creators and consumers.

I recently stumbled across Snippet while listening to a podcast hosted by Pat Flynn. It sounded interesting so I downloaded the app and purchased the book “Let Go” by Pat Flynn for $2.99. Very cool audio, visual and reading experience! The book has 14 chapters, seven 2-5min videos embedded in the text, a live Twitter feed and it took me about 2hrs to read. My kind of book! Or should I say…read, since it’s more than a book. It’s a multi-media experience. And as we learned in this previous post, use exceptional experiences to connect and engage Millennials.

3 Ways Snippet Rules:

Succinct: Every Snippet chapter has to be under 1,000 words (as a reference, this post is 363 words). With the flood of Internet content today, a succinct and clear message wins. Snippet is the Twitter for books.

Inexpensive: Books can be purchased for $0.99-$4.99. And it is also uncommonly inexpensive for writers to publish their work via Snippet.

Use of New Media: In the “stream economy” (a Gary Vaynerchuk term describing how we consume content via a Facebook or Twitter stream), Millennials (and just about any other busy individual) are looking for pictures and videos in the articles they stream. If the text is too heavy, they will scroll on by. Snippet leverages the use of photos, audio, video and social media to enrich the readers experience by sharing a more immersive story.

Slight Disadvantages:

Only available on the iPhone and iPad at this time but it seems that Snippet has plans to expand.

No text search capability inside the books.

Limited titles due to it’s new-ness.

The book publishing business has been long overdue for an overhaul, could Snippet be the next generation catalyst the industry needs?